Drawing An Idea: How To Sketch Your Lifetime Question

I always liked simple pencil drawing ideas. How to sketch an idea or trying to express a feeling with simple doodles, is a very fun and also thoughtful process. Without losing the joy or getting lost in philosophy, in this post, I shared my drawing about a question, a very serious one actually!

We all have the same question deep buried in our minds, "what is the meaning of my life?". The question is well asked but not easily answered. I don't intend to discuss the answer here. It is too subjective I think. But instead, I can try to express the same question by using figures and symbols just to approach from a different angle.

For starters, we can start to focus on the idea of our lives. If we are going to sketch a question to ask the meaning of life, we can talk about the whole lifetime. Because for me, people want to see something built by them when they get old. Something that has a meaning, if not to the whole world but at least to themselves. So here I want to express the sum of all moments in my life, not any single one of them.

Ok, what do we have at hand? Let's make a list of words to express the idea.

• meaning,
• lifetime,
• moments,
• sum,
• question,
• birth
• death,
• living,
• feelings,
• alive,
• commonly known symbols,
• health,
  etc...

To have some kind of basis, I will start with a symbol for sum or addition. I am following the idea "sum of all your moments, is your life...". The first things come to my mind are a plus sign, sigma (summation symbol in maths) and the integration symbol...

Then maybe the most common thing that represents life, feelings, health and alike is surely a heart symbol.



Let's continue to find out some more symbols. If we are talking about life, then we can talk about it's boundaries. Basically, it is in between birth and death. If I can express birth and death, it would also be great to limit our addition range.



The basic figure would be a tombstone for death. But what about birth? What is the starting point, and the most obvious thing about birth? How do we visualize birth? I can talk about cribs, baby shoes, breastfeeding or even umbilical cord. But these are happening sometime later. I wanted to carry the "birth", a little before the physical birth. For example, a sperm or an egg cell (ovum) could be good candidates, where everything starts. I thought an egg cell wouldn't be understood much but a sperm figure is a perfect match. Also doodling a sperm is very easy.



Back to addition symbol, I find integration more suitable since this symbol is used for a continuous domain. The other symbols, namely plus sign and the sigma operator, they are more used for discrete domains. So life is not discrete! And an integration symbol does look more smooth.

After colliding these symbols for a while, I had the following sequence for the symbols:

Actually placing of all the symbols was dictated by the notation for the integration symbol. Lower and upper limits for the integration are the sperm and tombstone respectively. Then "d" stands for an infinitely small section. I used it because of the notation as well. I believe it is a good fit, if you think of every single moment, compared to life as a whole, it can match the metaphor.

Further drawing, was once more implied by the notation! I need something in between the "S" shape and "d" letter. That would mean, I am trying to add up every single heartbeat that represents "a moment", from birth until death, over the missing function. For the sake of simplicity, I prefer to stick on heartbeats, which may also represent our living rhythm. Then the image from the medical monitors that show heartbeats, came to my mind.

The last thing to do is to combine it with the rest and add a question mark.



This doodle, I believe can be thought to express the question everybody has in mind, in a very different angle. Literally, "What is the sum of every single heartbeat, from birth to death ?"


At last, if you believe it was worth to read, thumbs up, please!